skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a good example... one candidate chose to explain how residential firefighting works. They got into explaining why water is really important. I asked them about halon and they indulged a little bit. Then I asked them to explain how halon works. And so on...

If they haven't shut me down by the 3rd question, it's a sign they're never going to, and I stop distracting them.

For junior candidates, I usually don't even bother with this, because I am not going to stop myself from hiring just because they fail this question. So it's usually better to see if they can do well at just the core question.
Good point about the lack of agility. Internal politics probably have a negative impact as well. I could see some team's feature going live for 1% of users then managers and other internal stake holders endlessly arguing about the measurements, data etc.
Thanks for the kind words and helpful feedback everyone! We appreciate it!

If you're still having trouble with Chrome or Firefox, please reply below with your browser and version, and possibly with a gist/pastebin of any console errors. Mark and I will get on it.

Regarding the lag: We match you with players based on your latency to each gameserver and the amount of time you've been waiting. If you experienced a lot of lag earlier, it might have been due to there being too few players online. However, 196 people are playing as I type this now, and hopefully there's now enough player density so you'll get matched with a lower-latency player who's nearby.

You can read more on our blog post: http://blog.artillery.com/2012/10/play-powderkeg-html5-multi...

We're also on VentureBeat today: http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/04/artillery-aims-to-make-web...

Also, I'd like to thank our amazing artist, Adam deGrandis. Check out his portfolio — he's incredible: http://www.adamdegrandis.com/portfolio/

<3
We have those laws because there are major societal issues we are trying to address, and because we have decided those factors are not material to hiring.

You shouldn't legislate against human stupidity. Meanness, though, is a fine target for legislation.
I love this game. It is a themed copy of Hudson Soft's Bomberman game that I originally played on the SNES.

The creators have a blog entry about latency and websockets. With even a minimal amount of packetloss, TCP makes for really bad latency - http://blog.artillery.com/2012/06/websocket-performance.html

It's too bad we won't see any playable twitch games in the browser until there is some way to do UDP. I don't see why browsers don't just allow UDP subject to same origin policy, perhaps only on pages which serve a special "X-Allow-UDP" header.

From what I understand, the only reason browsers shy away from being able to send UDP packets is fear of DDOS. This does not seem to be an issue if packets are only sent to same host that the page is served from.
Salesforce and Oracle Struggle with Change
Thanks for the report! On it...
Well, there may or may not have been racism occurring (sometimes it is difficult to distinguish a joke). Now if you are the type of person who thinks a racist joke is a "bad" joke, then I guess you also hate South Park and love to bathe in politically-correct self-righteousness. I have friends of every race, and we joke openly about our respective races/religions/ethnicities.

The one thing I will say is that the author is clearly racist towards white people (yes, this is possible), or at the very least grossly lumps all white people into the same category. A few quotes from his article (linked below):
-- "Beyond culture = hipster racism = neoliberal white supremacy"
-- "Dumbwhite*"
-- "A brief moment of clarity only to be again submerged in the sea of white privilege and supremacy"
-- "white men always telling which way is up because they feel they are the “authority” when it comes to any and everything, most often when they don’t know shit about shit except how to protect their privilege by telling me my life experience is false"

The author takes (at most) minor infractions, and uses them to demonize the entire white race.

On the other hand, it would be stupid for a company with a culture like this to hire a gay black guy, they are just asking for a lawsuit.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/kixeye-takes-substantial-c...
I've been using the 64bit version for 2 weeks, all my old apps work fine, everything seems faster, overall happier. I would love to have a unix terminal though, thats what keeps me using a macbook.
Snort 2.9.4Beta Released - Penetration Testing and Security Tools
What's your solution to the bathroom problem?
It comes down to conversion rates from free -> paid users. Is there an itch that your customer must scratch and is willing to pay for ? As long as that motivator exists you will see good conversion rates. However if the idea is to sell 'cool' things that add bling to a service / app, it is less likely to sustain profit.
Feedburner also helps ensure a good experience for the user while subscribing to the feed. Instead of showing a page of XML or requiring the user to configure an action in the browser/system to handle feeds, FeedBurner subscribe screens show a useful page for subscribing in whatever way the user wants (especially good for Google Reader and such).
New York, NY - Full Time - J.Crew - Senior Java Web Application Developer

Are you looking to work on something new? Want to be part of an exciting project that is currently underway? Than this opportunity at might be the one for you. Please feel free to reach out to me at Jason.Chen@jcrew.com if you are interested..

Java Web Application Developer - http://goo.gl/YDSF5

This is just a snippet of what the team has been working on...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57402801-93/j.crew-uses-tec...
It's definitely a small sample size, but I have more data on this than any other techniques I've seen out there.

I've been overruled once after no hiring a candidate. Low and behold the same person ended up nearly getting fired 9 months later for the very same issues that came up from this question. They struggled to answer even the simplest questions with one sentence responses.
I've met developers over 50 who were passionate not only about their job but about their prospects for learning new things. I think that's a character attribute that you either have or don't have, and I don't see a lot of evidence that it fades with age.

I have also met a lot of developers who are passionate about the lifestyle features of being a startup software developer but who are also willfully stuck in ruts like spending months cultivating positions about which testing framework best expresses the right testing methodology, or whether HTML is best generated serverside or clientside. They don't read papers, they plan on maybe one day learning C, but they wear the right t-shirt and are on the right IRC channels. These are things that might matter a lot when you're just starting out in your career but don't so much matter at all when you've got your sea legs.

There are a lot of those people and I think that may color our impression of which age bracket is most engaged.
Quantum computing and nuclear fusion power generation are probably 2 of the biggest problems to solve in order to make the next technological leap.

If D-Wave comprehensively cracks Quantum computing I reckon Bezos may become the world's first Trillionaire.
Firefox for Windows 8 preview build now available for download
Sweet game! It's a remake/rip of Bomberman, which is totally awesome because Bomberman is the best game ever.
> "If someone can be completely encapsulated by a bunch of photos, links, and pokes, do you really want to be friends with them anyway?"

That about sums it up.
> It's the girl you're on a date with who seems more enamored with your race's stereotypes than you.

I liked your post, but this point I don't think I can relate to.

Do you include cultural attributes in the stereotypes definition? For example, would it be racial to assume that your relatives are close to you because it's common in (East) Asia?
Just wanted to say, Brandon is super knowledgeable in this area - great guy and resource.
They never let me know what the inappropriate content was. The page was restored with all the history/content intact and all likes intact. Yes I am very concerned and paranoid it could happen again and I've really locked down my page a lot more that I probably would have otherwise. For example I don't let users post to our wall anymore, they can only comment on our own posts.

Even before we were mysteriously blocked I never let users post photos/videos to our wall and obviously we'd never allow any inappropriate content there.
The first graph has the wrong label for the x axis.
I tried to teach my nephew to code with python. He is 7. It didnt stick on the first attempt. However when I showed him how to use a for loop, he printed a multiplication table, turned around to his mom and exclaimed 'homework done' ! :)
But it's not a common question, and wildly uncommon questions in an interview can cause even great minds to seize. Interviewing for a tech support job years ago was the most difficult interview I'd ever been in, because the manager didn't stick to the script, so to speak. He threw out random questions, completely unrelated to the job, in a rapid fire manner. Just to see if he could throw you off, to see if he could get you to seize. What is your favorite book? I like the Hitchhiker's Gu-What was the last song playing on your drive over here? It was Lola by The Ki-What color shirt are you wearing, without looking down?

You can prepare for an interview. And the interviewer can prepare to surprise you. The sudden pressure is when you're asked an important question that you had no knowledge was going to be asked.
> "The other reason that could have caused the closure of our FB page is that we sometimes use images even when we do not know who has taken the picture."

And that, folks, is why you at least attribute your sources. I feel no sympathy for a company who has no compunction about posting others' work uncited/unattributed much less even uncompensated.
I read things a bit differently; the assumption is that the product experiences 30% customer growth per year (around 2.2% growth per month) and loses 10% of those <i>new customers</i> per month. I think you may have read it to mean a loss of 10% of all customers per month.
" Take as much time as you want to think it through, and let me know when you want to start."

I think part of the point is that there is no guidance since they're looking for someone who is passionate enough about something to be able to explain it. It sounds like you'll have time to gather your thoughts and it is even seen as a negative if you don't. I'm sure you can come up with something to explain after 5 minutes.
I think a disclaimer might be appropriate here ;) Not that I mind at all; CloudFlare is awesome.
I would probably spend a lot of time trying to decide which area was appropriately work-safe and which was not. For instance, I would never discuss any of my table-top gaming hobbies unless I knew them for some time. I wouldn't discuss any theatre-related topics, either.

I could probably do an hour or two on some technical topics, without causing too many suicides, but I would only consider those if they were relevant to the job I was seeking.
> One caveat I would mention about data analysis would be that statistics is not just number crunching

Agreed. Analysis that is well presented tells a story. The story begins with where the data comes from, then describes how the data was analyzed, and finally how the results relate back to the real world. If any of these pieces are missing, or unconvincing, it's a good sign that something is off, like you say, with either a) The data, or b) the significance of the conclusion.

I emphasize the story aspect because the act of laying out all of the assumptions in a semi-narrative form goes a long way towards deobfuscating the potentially confusing statistics. It is also the sort of discipline that can help to lay bare all of the assumptions that could make you sure that you know the answer.
How to apply Navigation Service with Windows Phone
I think one issue that people tend to forget in the debate is that immigrants are also additional customers for existing and new US businesses. They may or may not work in a job that an American could do, but they will always be customers of businesses in the United States. Given that the overwhelming majority of GDP is based on US-produced goods and services, that means that the overwhelming majority immigrant income is contributing to the growth of the US economy (foreign manufacturing only a couple % of GDP).

Immigration around the ~1870s was effectively the greatest "importation of customers" this country has ever seen.

A simple rule like anyone with assets in excess of $300k and work that pays $50k+ per year can move here with no restrictions would be great for the country. Bonus points if we allow everyone that already works remotely and internationally to come here ASAP if they want to (i.e. people with jobs they are bringing with them)

Allow the world's 1%ers to come here freely and you are essentially importing domestic growth for everyone already living in the US.
This is a tangent, but there are several segues you can use to get from anime to a generic technical discussion. Here are my examples:

- I wrote a scraper for MyAnimeList.net to an sqlite3 db in order to build a mobile website.

- I wrote a shell script that i keep a copy of in each folder for each anime series i watch. When the script runs, it parses its own name as a number and adds one, so that i can easily keep track of what episode i'm up to.

I'm sure there are ways to turn almost any controversial hobby into something technical and demonstrable. Even if it's not something that you've built directly - Do you use the MAL Updater? Have you tried out Vocaloid? Using a really interesting playback method (hi10p, lavf, madvr, ...)? You could explain how they work.
You can give users a proper RSS/ATOM URL in your domain space and still use Feedburner -- redirect "mysite.com/feed" to your Feedburner URL. People started doing this years ago as a hedge against this exact situation, so that if Feedburner went down, your users' RSS clients will still point to an address under your control. For a while it was even an unofficial Feedburner recommendation. They had a blog post about it and everything. :)
http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flo...

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow
I'm not gonna say by how much, but I passed that mark some time ago. So the answer is emphatically yes.
RockMelt is still using Chromium 16
Did anyone else catch the temperature miscalculation?

> It is actually a cold gun: the structure is a chilly -259 °F (4 °Kelvin) at the wide end and a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero at its tip...

4 degrees Kelvin is approx -452 Fahrenheit is approx -269 Celsius. Absolute zero is −459.67° F
I actually heard this question before Google even existed. It's not my original idea either. This is an old Microsoft interview question, and I would imagine it predates them too.
Tumblr Gets Analytics via Union Metrics
Well, it is not always necessary to "resonate well with students", especialy in a tertiary education scenario. May be this is a requirement for primary or high-school level, but for university? I don't think so.

I did my undergrad from an insignificant public school in a third world country, but secured my masters (by research, no coursework) from one of the top 30 schools from that list and it was an enlightening experience.

To say the truth, I have learned most of the undergrad craps by myself (thanks to our local book markets teeming with pirated/photocopied books) -- in my case, the contribution from the so called "good teachers" is almost none. the "quality of teaching" is a very subtle concept and thers is no apparently good way to measure it. I think it is the "research" that should matter the most. Above all, no one is interested in average GPA of students.
You build a large bathroom closer to the banquet hall. :)
A similar game, http://bombermine.ru/, that seems to handle the latency/synchronization in a friendlier way.

(found on http://blog.artillery.com/2012/07/six-impossible-problems.ht...)
What is the purpose of using feedburner? -> Statistics? or the possibility that users can subscribe by email to your updates?
More Machines – Open Source Keyline Plow
That's too context-specific to answer without a whole lot more questions. Plus, if we're actually talking about code, physical metaphors break down anyhow. First-cut answer is "move bathrooms closer"/"make the hallway bigger" but one must also ask the question, "How did this mismatch arise in the first place?" Anything is possible, especially in software; the hallway may in fact be adequate and it's everything else that is grossly overspec'ed... or in fact, you might have ended up with a poorly-designed dining room for 100 people because that's all the previous guy knew how to build, when in fact you need a stadium for 100,000 people. (I've been there before.)
Homomorphic encryption: Compute with data you cannot read
WebRTC allows for general UDP packets (in the spec at least - haven't tried it in Chrome stable) so hopefully this will be a workable solution as it gets more support.
Even if the math was fixed it is bullshit because the numbers are made up.

I can think of a few companies who lost out on my business because I was able to test out their competitor, for free, before handing over all of my billing info. If someone wants to know the impact of killing their free plans, then they can easily test it.

Each company has its own math formula for what works, and that formula will change, if not by the day, then by the month, as the market evolves. In the case of most start ups, it is going to change very rapidly.

My rule: offer just enough to free so a customer can see the value, but not enough that they can do "damage" (e.g. derive a massive amount of sustained value to their own business.)
Fizzbuzz, Interviews, And Overthinking
I think you are correct about the short attention spans and need of quick rewards. Here is my strat to combat it.

My Son is 2 yrs old, and I want to start teaching programming at 5.

2-3 work on reading
3-4 work on basic math
4-5 work on basic algebra (w/tools like dragon box of course)

5+ start programming strat
- find an open source game
- start playing it with my son
- after a while start modifying the code with my son

To sum it up in one sentence... get your child emotionally invested in the environment before trying to show him how to manipulate it.
Employees Deserve Feedback
I'd have liked to have seen sfmoma look more like it does. I think the app is really fun and "mapping" is a hot area right now with lots of room for different approaches.
wow thank you for this. haven't thought about bomberman in years and within 5 seconds i was having a great time.

lag issues ("waiting for other players") and passer-throughs are making it a bit difficult to get a game going though.

edit: this has a few crippling bugs. seems like i have the most trouble after someone leaves a game. also, this desperately needs chat, or voice chat, and a high score. thanks again this is the most fun i've had in a while.
EETimes' Silicon 60: Hot startups to watch
Programming isn't fun — it's much more than that
It's not the government and it's not the business environment. The problem is with the people.

Look at some of the "worst" African countries. Chinese and Indians are coming in there and opening up shops. They are starting restaurants and barber shops and all kinds of low startup cost businesses. They are doing well, and they are putting the old school 'local' businesses out of business. In fact, in some African countries they are considering making residency much more difficult for the Chinese because they are so successful there.

Too many people in African and Latin American countries have a sense of entitlement. When they think a community needs something, they think the government should provide it or subsidize it.

It is hard to shift this mindset, but it is happening in some urban pockets. There are small circles of entrepreneurship in most bigger African/LA cities. (I'm talking about guys starting from ground up, not rich privileged people starting more capital intensive enterprises.) But it's going to take a while.

Ironically, the biggest sense of entrepreneurial spirit I was was actually in Zimbabwe. As bad is it is there right now, I have a feeling this will be a big positive turnaround sooner or later.
There are all-electric vehicles with considerably better than cm/s speeds.
French beekeepers in Ribeauville abuzz over blue honey
I was asked what my hobbies were when interviewing for a job. I replied that I was currently working through reading books that had banned for various reasons. When asked what that last book I read, I replied "Atlas Shrugged", and explained the premise, story, and conclusions of Ayn Rand.

The interviewer hated Ayn Rand but still hired me.

Explaining and articulating why you are a socialist and the conclusions that lead you to the view is exactly the purpose of the question.
> I would give candidates some period of time (say, 10 minutes, if they needed that long) to select a topic first.

It appears you would not be hired because of your lack of reading comprehension.

The article clearly states that you have as much time as you want to gather your thoughts and it's a bad sign if a candidate starts right away.
Kitchen Aid Social Media Debacle
Please note extremely effective demonstration of "privilege".

Two employee candidates interview successively. One is 25, the other 53. Both are comparably conversant in technology, evince comparable cognitive capability, are equivalently literate in the problem domain being tackled by the role they're interviewing for.

Privilege: the 25 year old is not asked (overtly or subtextually) whether they "want to be doing this". It is simply assumed that the 25 year old's head is in the game. No demonstration of lifestyle commitment to the craft is required.

Take the idea and turn it around in your hands for a little while. Try this: imagine that instead of software developers, these were master woodcrafters; luthiers, say. Notice how the subtext changes: age is an asset. A lifetime spent designing guitars is a signifier of passion and competence. Flip the switch back to development and notice how age suddenly connotes something else, like "career failure forcing person to retain technical role".

You will get old someday, if you're lucky. But controlling for spectacularly unlikely values of "lucky", you are aren't going to strike gold in this field, such that you'll have no career concerns when you're 45-50. It is unfortunate that our field manages to devalue competence and experience that way it does; here's a second-time Rails gem author instead of a virtual memory system designer, see you at SXSW!
But is there a good way to boil that down to a single metric? (i.e., can we parametrize these curves with a single value?)
It was a small project. Generates about ~$600/month in passive profit.
> hobbies are controversial, or simply derided

I think that answers your question.

Look, you're asking someone to walk into an interview, with people they do not know, and lay out a portion of their personal life for examination, without any idea of how that information may be used against them. That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company.

I, for one, do not discuss my private life in depth in interviews - it's not the company's or the interviewers business to know that, beyond certain legal issues.

I may choose to discuss at some point in the future when I better know the person to whom I speak, but until then, it's strictly a professional relationship.
And now you want to sue someone just because they wrote an article about your "business model"

http://www.secnews.pl/en/2012/10/04/software-press-chce-mnie...

nice job!
Facebook confirms it is scanning your private messages to increase Likes